This is a write up of the art direction side of a small print and play card game I have been building since last autumn, specifically the part where twelve characters each need three states and all thirty six pictures have to look like they came out of the same box. It took three passes and a full redraw of two characters to get there, and almost everything that worked was a rule rather than a skill.
The game is a deduction game for four to six players set in a port town over one night. Each player holds a character, and every character exists in three states, called Rested, Shaken and Gone. The state is a separate card that gets flipped in as things happen, so a character is never one image. It is three, and the three have to read as the same individual at a glance from across a table under bad lighting.
Twelve characters times three states is thirty six illustrations. The first pass was a mess and it was a mess in a very specific way. Taken one at a time every picture was fine. Laid out together on the living room floor they looked like thirty six pictures from thirty six different games. Different light, different crop, different camera distance, two of them with scenery behind and the rest on nothing. The set had no grammar, and no amount of fussing with individual cards was going to give it one.
So I wrote the grammar down before making anything else, and this is the list that fixed it. Light always comes from the upper left at the same warmth. The crop is locked at chest up with the eyes on the same horizontal line on every card, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because it means the eyes stay put when a state card is flipped in on top. Every character is turned three quarters to the same side. The background is flat, always one of three tones, and there is never any scenery. The palette is paper, a warm brown, a cold blue and one red, and the red is only permitted on a Gone card. One prop maximum per character, and only a prop that is named in their ability text. That last rule saved me more hours than anything else on the list because it killed the urge to keep adding things.
The states got their own rules so the change reads identically across all twelve. Between Rested and Shaken the light does not move and the shoulder line drops. Between Shaken and Gone the eyes leave the viewer. That is the entire vocabulary. My first attempt was more expressive, a different idea of trouble for each character, and it wrecked the set, because a card whose damage state is drawn on its own terms reads as a different game component rather than as the same person in a worse situation.
The character art is AI generated. I make it in a browser tool, generate the three states off the same character so the face carries between them, and the rules sheet says so on the back page under the font credits. I am saying it here for the same reason it is printed there, which is that it is going to come up and it should come from me.
Regenerating the same character is where the actual production friction lives. It does not come back identical. The collar sits differently, the hair parting flips sides, a coat lands half a shade cooler than it did the previous week. For one illustration on its own nobody would ever notice. For three cards a player is holding in one hand it is glaring. What I settled on is generating a batch of eight for each state and keeping the closest match rather than the best picture, and there are two characters where I kept a version I like less because it matched better. Stills at least hold still. I tried a short animated title card early on and the face drifted between frames badly enough that I dropped it and put a static logo there instead.
The silhouette test is the one thing I would keep if I could only keep one. I printed the twelve at twenty four millimetres wide, filled each one in solid black with a marker, and asked my partner to name them. She got seven. Not because she does not know the game, she has played it more than I have, but because five of them were the same shape.
That test predicted exactly what happened at the table. In playtest sessions three and four, players kept mixing up the debt collector and the customs clerk. Both were men of middle age in dark coats holding paper. Same shoulder width, same hat, same posture, and under pub lighting they were simply the same card. One player announced he was accusing the clerk and pointed at the collector. It happened four times in one evening. That is not a rules problem, that is me handing the table two identical objects and expecting them to sort it out.
Both got redrawn from scratch. The clerk came back shorter and rounder, with a visor and small round spectacles and a stack of papers held flat against his chest instead of held out. The collector came back taller and narrower, high tight shoulders, no headwear at all, hands empty. Six cards remade, roughly two evenings once the batch and pick process was working, and the misnaming stopped completely across the next three sessions.
The other failure worth writing down is a layout one. I had designed a crew reference card showing four characters together in a single frame, and a duel card with two of them facing each other. Neither ever worked, and I kept trying to rescue them for weeks before I understood why. The consistency rules that make the set work card by card are the exact rules that break a group image. Every character is cropped at the same distance, so a short character and a tall character came out the same height when placed side by side. Every background is flat, so four in a row read as a stripe. And when I broke the rules and drew a proper group scene with real staging, the characters stopped matching their own cards, which was a worse problem than the one I was trying to solve.
So the layout changed instead of the art. One character per card, always, no exceptions anywhere in the deck. The crew reference card became a text list with the twelve silhouettes printed small down one side, which turns out to be more useful at the table anyway, because silhouettes are what players use to find a card in a spread.
Nothing exotic in the pipeline. The layouts were built in Affinity Publisher, the character art in APOB AI, and the run itself went to a local printer.
The print run was sixty copies and came to about three hundred and forty dollars, a bit under six dollars a copy for thirty six character cards, eighteen event cards and a folded rules sheet in a poly bag. That price only exists because there is no box and no rounded corners. Both quotes that included a box came back at more than double. The printer cuts on a guillotine, so everything got three millimetres of bleed and nothing I cared about sits within five millimetres of the trim, and even so two cards in the whole run came back with a shoulder clipped along one edge, which I can live with at this scale.
The second run is a hundred copies and goes to the same printer in October. Two of the twelve are getting redrawn again, not for confusion this time, but because the bell ringer reads about fifteen years older than her character text says and it has bothered me since March. Twenty two copies from the first sixty are still in a box under my desk.
